Do Androids Dream of Electric Leaks?

Twenty years ago today, Radiohead released OK Computer, a departure of an album rightfully lauded as ahead of its time. Its sonic and lyrical palate colored in a vision of an impending dystopian near future, with its protagonists seething and recoiling from the oppressive ubiquity of technology. It took much of its influence for its themes from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series—particularly in its centerpiece "Paranoid Android." That song, the second track on the record, is a time-signature shifting, darkly satirical piece about petty revenge, with visceral disgust at consumerism and social ambition at its core. Ultimately, "Paranoid Android" was a resignation to the futility of resistance—presenting a state of chaotic paranoia that feels all too familiar.

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In 1997, our cultural co-dependency on computers was still in its infancy. But at long last, two decades later, the future Thom Yorke and company imagined has arrived. "OK, computer," we've all come to admit. Not by way of compliment, but as the terms of our surrender. And the computer has driven us all mad.

Riot shields, voodoo economics. It's just business, cattle prods and the I.M.F. I trust I can rely on your vote.

A few months ago,a WikiLeaks dump pointed to a CIA program called Weeping Angel, detailing how hackers could secretly access the listening capabilities of our smart televisions and other home devices, plus additional instances of widespread hacking of smartphones. This comes as we labor under the reality that ourown government is indeed spying on us. Not to mention a state of constant fear that the Russian government hacked into our election systems, as a classified National Security Agency document leaked to The Intercept recently posited. The alleged leaker, the ironically named Reality Winner, confirmed a sense of paranoia that many of us live with daily. She was paranoid too, but perhaps not paranoid enough, as she was arrested for her efforts, having left a data trail that was easy to trace.

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This is the inevitable state of modernity.

Whether or not you believeyour smartphone is spying on you in the traditional sense, collecting the specifics of your private conversations for some nefarious unstated purpose, it's undeniable that every movement you make, every conversation you have, is now a piece of data that can, and if we're being honest, at some point will, be used against you. Whether that's simply to better tailor advertisements to your tastes or to pinpoint your location in the always-impending large scale herding of dissenters into the cattle pen remains to be seen. Just because you're paranoid… as the saying goes.

The head of state has called for me by name. But I don't have time for him. It's gonna be a glorious day. I feel my luck could change.

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And why wouldn't we be paranoid? The inmates aren't just running the asylum now, they've franchised the whole operation and set one up on every street corner. If the tenor of a country's mood can be said to be reflected by our chief executive, what more would you expect from us when we're being led by the equivalent of a muttering old acid casualty in a ratty bathrobe yelling at the TV? Every barking tweet from President Trump further cements our collective state of cultural psychosis, tilting at windmills in the shape of special prosecutors and the boogeyman of the mainstream media. What better illustration do we need than the bleakly comical episode of President Schrödinger's Comey tapes, both existing and not existing at the same time. The President of the United States has teased, honestly or not, that he was so paranoid going into a meeting with the director of the FBI that he felt compelled to record the conversation surreptitiously. This is not normal. Or, rather, like most things, it wasn't normal until it was.

James Comey better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!

So lock the kids up safe tonight. Shut the eyes in the cupboard. I've got the smell of a local man who's got the loneliest feeling.

In return, many of us have transplanted our consciousness into the midst of a cheap espionage thriller. A Russian behind every bush. Each day the humanoids on both the left and the right dutifully report to our work stations, ready to, well, it's not clear what we're actually supposed to be doing, but ready at least to receive, and then amplify, transmissions from our increasingly diminishing pool of trusted soothsayers. For some obscure pockets of the left, it's byzantine reports from the likes of Louise Mensch, filed daily from the land of no reality, about this forthcoming arrest, or that badly mangled legal potentiality. Never mind that, like many of Trump's promises (the millions of illegal voters he was going to ferret out at some point), none of the predictions ever pan out—it's enough to toss the whole room into chaos. There are enough shoes suspended in the air waiting to drop that you can't walk outside without kicking yourself in the face.

When I am king, you will be first against the wall. With your opinion which is of no consequence at all.

On the far right, which has become virtually indistinguishable from the standard issue right, Alex Jones would be the conspiracy-theorist-in-chief, if that particular gig wasn't already occupied by the president. Jones, currently in the midst of playing NBC and host Megyn Kelly like a beat-up thrift store acoustic,revealed Thursday night that he had recorded an interview that was meant to air this Sunday, effectively scooping Kelly. He further released tapes he had made of supposedly off-the-record conversations with the anchor, in which she tried to convince him to come on her show in the first place.

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In the tapes, Kelly attempts to assuage his fears that she is out to get him. A creature of an outdated media model, perhaps Kelly didn't let her paranoia go far enough. It was the savvy Jones who was doing the dirty work here, and she somehow, amazingly, never saw it coming.

"In the past, NBC could manipulate and lie, they were the gods," Jones said in a clip over footage of the 1981 film Clash of the Titans. Jones, in his telling, is Perseus, descending into the Labyrinth to slay Medusa. It probably doesn't matter that the Labyrinth was actually Daedalus' hang out—there's so much overarching paranoia about backstabbing, betrayal, and prophecies of future deceit in mythology, it can be easy to get them confused. The gods were paranoid, and we reciprocally reinvent ourselves in the image of the gods, just as we shovel our own identity of the moment in the feedback loop.

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"Megyn Kelly waltzed in here and told me she was going to do a softball interview with Alex Jones … she did the opposite of what she said. We were recording the whole time. These tyrants haven't figured it out yet, that information warfare is a two-way street."

There isn't much that Jones is right about, but he's got the meat of it there in his teeth. All our paranoia now, rightfully felt and otherwise, has turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Trump, shouting into the cavern ceaselessly about his fear of being investigated, has brought about that very eventuality. And the rest of us, like Jones, worried about how our words and deeds might be manipulated in the event that we're being spied upon, have taken to spying on ourselves. We're doing the mysterious unseen forces' work for them.

Ambition makes you look pretty ugly.

It wasn't long ago that one of our biggest fears was that when we gathered—at political rallies and protests, and so on—that the authorities, the government, the man, were spying on us, filming us, collecting our names for their infernal database. Go to one now, and it's clear that they needn't even have bothered clocking in for the day. A pro-free speech rally in Boston not long ago that I attended was nothing more than a sea of cameras pointed at each other and in every direction. In every argument, every heated debate, either party was perfunctorily recording the other, live-streaming, or as insurance for some unforeseeable complication that might arise later.

When talking about OK Computer, Yorke called the title, also taken from Douglas Adams, "a really resigned, terrified phrase." It refers, he said, "to embracing the future, it refers to being terrified of the future, of our future, of everyone else's. It's to do with standing in a room where all these appliances are going off and all these machines and computers and so on ... and the sound it makes."

Twenty years later, it sounds more prescient than ever. If you haven't heard it in a while, try it now. Maybe ask Alexa or your Google Home to put it on. They're definitely listening.

Meanwhile:

I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt

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